"

"And yet, if I should kill you, now--where you sit--"

Kao shrugged his slim shoulders, and Keith heard that soft, gurgling
laugh that McDowell had said was like the splutter of oil.

"I have arranged. It is all in writing. If anything should happen to
me, there are messengers who would carry it swiftly. To harm me would
be to seal your own doom. Besides, you would not leave here alive. I am
not afraid."

"How am I to deliver Miriam Kirkstone to you?"

Kao leaned forward, his fingers interlacing eagerly. "Ah, NOW you have
asked the question, John Keith! And we shall be friends, great friends,
for you see with the eyes of wisdom. It will be easy, so easy that you
will wonder at the cheapness of the task. Ten days ago Miriam Kirkstone
was about to pay my price. And then you came. From that moment she saw
you in McDowell's office, there was a sudden change. Why? I don't know.
Perhaps because of that thing you call intuition but to which we give a
greater name. Perhaps only because you were the man who had run down
her father's murderer. I saw her that afternoon, before you went up at
night. Ah, yes, I could see, I could understand the spark that had
begun to grow in her, hope, a wild, impossible hope, and I prepared for
it by leaving you my message. I went away. I knew that in a few days
all that hope would be centered in you, that it would live and die in
you, that in the end it would be your word that would bring her to me.
And that word you must speak tonight. You must go to her, hope-broken.
You must tell her that no power on earth can save her, and that Kao
waits to make her a princess, that tomorrow will be too late, that
TONIGHT must the bargain be closed. She will come. She will save her
brother from the hangman, and you, in bringing her, will save John
Keith and keep Derwent Conniston's sister. Is it not a great reward for
the little I am asking?"

It was Keith who now smiled into the eyes of the Chinaman, but it was a
smile that did not soften that gray and rock-like hardness that had
settled in his face. "Kao, you are a devil. I suppose that is a
compliment to your dirty ears. You're rotten to the core of the thing
that beats in you like a heart; you're a yellow snake from the skin in.
I came to see you because I thought there might be a way out of this
mess. I had almost made up my mind to kill you. But I won't do that.
There's a better way. In half an hour I'll be with McDowell, and I'll
beat you out